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" We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews. "

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" It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke. "

" I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong. "

" The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get a TiVo, and they'll say things like 'Your life will be completely different.' It's true. "

" You get into this situation, performing for T.V., where you have to speak with utter sincerity. It's just like the radio. You have to say it like you mean it, even though the thing you're saying is actually planned out. "

" I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness. "

" I was a freelancer all through my 20s and was very slow to get good at what I did. "

" Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best. "

" I'm not a natural storyteller at all. If anything, I'm a natural interviewer, a natural listener, but I'm not a natural storyteller. "

" I don't think I'm better than everyone else at anything, but I am very quick at organizing a big mass of interview tape into a structure. "

" Traditional broadcast media seems old-fashioned and vague to me. When I watch television news, I'm aware of what skilled journalists they are, but I find it hard because of the corny way they present it. "

" I suppose I shouldn't go around admitting I speak untruths on the radio. When I say something untrue on the air, I mean for it to be transparently untrue. I assume people know when I'm just saying something for effect. Or to be funny. "

" I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.' "

" The Flash could do everything twice as fast. Except you never saw him think twice as fast or speak twice as fast. Could he do math faster than the other superheroes? Could he compute the tip for the bill twice as fast? "

" I have been shocked at the number of people who don't watch television. "

" People are generally forced to change. We don't want to change, and then something absolutely forces us to realize that what we are doing isn't working or that our picture of the world is wrong. We fail. So we change. "

" I think the name of the show, 'This American Life' - we named it that just because it seemed like it made the thing feel big. But we don't think about whether it's an American story or not. We happen to be Americans. I think for the stories to work, they have to be universal. "

" When I started 'This American Life', one of the reactions I got was, 'When is the adult going to show up who will host the show?' At some point, people just got used to it. "

" I don't know how to read. I get all my news from Jon Stewart every day. "

" I feel like, in general in my work life, my main goal has been to just be in a situation where I'm not bored with my job. That's been the entire principle. Got my wish. "

" I think people who live in New York don't realize just how much time they spend talking about the subway. "

" I can only control what I can control. "

" I started out doing production work on promos, stuff like that. I didn't think it was cool to be working for NPR. I didn't need anything to be cool. I just wanted something to do that would be interesting. It was fun. I didn't think of it as anything else but fun. "

" I like excess. And giant M&M's. "

" One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story. "

" I remember that in Baltimore, where I grew up, we would drive by the radio station and tower of WBAL, and I would try to picture the people inside and what they did there. "

" When you're working in public radio, you don't have any money to advertise. "

" At some point, all comics have to go out and be retail salesmen doing door-to-door. And this idea of somebody who totally knows their craft having to get up for free in front of a crowd to work out some stuff they're thinking in their head, still, after as much success as you can get, is really interesting. "

" It's tricky, performing the show live. Because when you're in a big auditorium, in front of 700 people, the natural tendency is to want to talk louder. You want to project. "

" I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually. "

" In most daily journalism, you only fact-check something if it seems a little fishy. "